A valuable lesson I continue to learn in life is that sometimes when things don’t go the way I think they should be going and I end up not getting the results I want, may actually be my Higher Power sparing me from even greater pain if I had actually gotten what I wanted.
In the beginning of January of 2010, I would experience a day where I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. On that day, I’d sign on a dotted line for the short sale of my business (a bed and breakfast) and my home, where I officially lost $660,000 of cash that I had invested into both over the previous 7 years.
When I began that path in 2003, acquiring that business and home, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so to speak when it came to the new life I was building. As each year passed, I kept sinking more and more money into the business attempting to keep it afloat, with constant promises by my partner at the time that one day we’d sell it for well over 7 figures, and all of it will have been worth it.
In 2009, during the tail end of the housing crisis/shortage, we weren’t even able to pay a single mortgage bill for the entire year. Frankly, I was amazed that we didn’t go through a foreclosure that year. With little money left in the bank and not enough customers to support the business, more money was going out than coming in. Through a miracle, the owners of a competing bed and breakfast in town purchased it from us at the 11th hour, allowing me personally to walk away from it with nothing more than the shirt on my back. As the years passed after that, I checked on my old business from time to time, even stopping by at one point to see how it was faring. I was amazed at how even more beautiful it had become and thought for sure it had more than earned a 7-figured value. The thought of that though made me sick with all the financial loss I incurred from it.
I let this occupy me for years, often making me very resentful at times. I frequently wrestled with the thought that maybe I could have re-financed or invested a little more into it to get out of the hole we were in. But then one day, when I was on my own personal website, checking the links on my “About Me” page, I realized the hyperlink to my old bed and breakfast had become a dead page. I hit the link a few times thinking maybe it was a mistake. I even typed in the URL directly and the result stayed the same. After some digging, I discovered the bed and breakfast I once owned was no longer a bed and breakfast and had become a weekly rental property. After further digging, I discovered the innkeepers who bought the place from us in 2010 had sold it at the beginning of the pandemic for $765,000, which was only $80,000 more than I had originally paid for it, a number I was at least spending every year to keep it afloat.
Learning this blew my mind! After 10 years had passed since I had last owned that business, it had never even came close to the value my ex had promised we’d get from our investment. I realized that If I had remained in that business, spending even more to keep it afloat, refinancing, or doing something more to not lose it, I would have experienced far more financial loss than I did.
So yes, while I learned an incredible number of spiritual lessons from my life surrounding my old bed and breakfast and home, the most recent one I learned is one that continues to show me that my Higher Power always sees the bigger picture, even when I often don’t, and does spare me at times from even greater pain if I had actually gotten what I wanted…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
